1. Fleischman is a crank and...1.1 He succeeds by accident.
Success through monumental incompetence is indistinguishable from briliance to the general public.
See Christopher Columbus. Fleischman will spend the rest of his life unjustly rubbing his
detractors' noses in their public humiliation.1.2 He fails.
Nobody's opinion of him changes. The only people who profess to believe him are credulous people
and those who would exploit them. The people who've been saying he was a crank will be vindicated.
The wait and see people will also feel vindicated, and continue to wait and see, as it's no skin of
their proverbial noses.

2. Fleischman is a misunderstood genius and...2.1 He succeeds by dint of preserverence.
Vindication is sweet. Fleischman will spend the rest of his life justly rubbing his
detractors' noses in their public humiliation.2.2 He fails through no fault of his own.
Nobody's opinion of him changes. The only people who profess to believe him are credulous people
and those who would exploit them. The people who've been saying he was a crank will be vindicated.
The wait and see people will also feel vindicated, and continue to wait and see, as it's no skin of
their proverbial noses.

The moral of the story will either way: it never pays to give up. The only thing at stake is whether future generations of school children will be forced to produced earnest essays drawing this conclusion from the story.

The negative outcome:Fleischmann was a good scientist, who in a moment of over-exuberance over what he thought was a world changing discovery, rushed to publish in the publish or perish world.

He perished when it was discovered his research was not reproducible. Having become the laughinstock of the scientific world, he can no longer get his research published. Making a living is becoming hard, as he can't get research funding.

Rather than give up on science, and take a lower paying more menial job, he fall

"Fleischmann was a good scientist..." AND "...his research was not reproducible..."
Science is all about getting reproducible results, and a scientist who fails to do so is, by definition, not a good one.

It's incomprehensible to me how anyone could have the reckless disregard for their personal integrity to lie so baldly and maliciously misinform naive readers.

The thing is, we're not terminally deluded, as you apparently are. To the extent P&F's results were reproduced, it was because others reproduced the experimental sloppiness that led P&F to delude themselves into thinking they had discovered something interesting.

There was a flood of mutually inconsistent 'results' during the initial flurry of

I think getting this to work in a year is extremely unlikely, but if it ever does work, they'll have the IP on it. That IP might take a while to be worth something, but if it ever does pan out, it will be worth a lot. And there are other scientists who have claimed to reproduce the effect, though their reports are far more conservative--they don't want to get slagged the way Fleischmann was. According to them, the original experiment failed to document certain conditions that were necessary to produce fusio

Don't you think that if there were any useful results, we would have fusion already? It's not like the other scientists think "Oh, yeah, i can reproduce cold fusion. Let's not do anything with this revolutionary discovery.". The scientific community does not exile people who simply publish experiments that are hard to reproduce. Pons and Fleischmann's discovery was a fabrication, not just a poorly-documented experiment.

You're assuming even though cold fusion has been debunked by every physicist on the planet, there's still a small chance that Fleischmann and Pons were right after all. There is as much chance for this project to work as there is to design and build a heater powered by phlogiston [wikipedia.org].

Why persist in these malicious lies?... Perhaps you have a large investment in a tokamak company?

Actually, I'm part of the Zionist Occupation Government [wikipedia.org]. We're afraid that cheap energy will loosen our stranglehold on power. And discrediting Cold Fusion wasn't easy, let me tell you! We had to bribe, intimidate, or murder every single person who actually figured out how to design a generator using this process. Plus we had to secretly edit every relevent textbook and scientific paper so they'd use a physic

In me opinion, me conjectures/thinks they announced Fleischmann was hired to encourage people to invest in their company's stock. After all, if Fleischmann is willing to sign on.. they must have something of potential value. They even provided their stock ticker symbol in the article, so if you want to invest..it's easy!So, to me, this does not mean they have a viable product that is guaranteed to make millions, it just means they want people to invest money in their company.

Fleishman is delivering the science which everybody rejected until they no longer could ignore their discovery. This guy has balls. Willing to apply the science while the Doubting Thomas's snicker and lift a finger to type diatribes at him.

He might have balls but that doesn't mean that he's not full of it. This is no more than a cynical attempt by this company to aquire venture funding. People have not ignored his 'science'; they have tested it, found that there is nothing in it and moved on.

Indeed he does have cojones. There was a good special on Living on Earth about cold fusion. Turns out, the experiments have in fact been replicated but it's difficult to do so. Seems that Pons and Fleischmann jumped the gun with their discovery. Instead of publishing it and subjecting it to peer review, they put it to the media first.

That was their first mistake because in the process, critical details about the procedure for producing cold fusion were left out.

There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's. The question is what? If Pons and Fleischmann send in their research to scientific journals saying we did this experiment and we regularly got excess heat we can't expalin and we don't know why, Pons and Fleischmann are heroes to the scientific community.

Where Pons and Fleischmann made their mistake was rushing to the press to stick a label "Cold Fusion" to their unexplained phenomena that they even admitted they didn't really understand.

Whatever the phenomenon Pons and Fleischmann discovered is, too many people have repeated similar work and been successful getting similar results.

Mendel did a lot of great work on genetics and heredity without knowing a thing about DNA. I have a feeling the Pons and Fleischmann work will be a similar situation. They found an experiment that proves something in a science we are incapable of analyzing yet.

Even if what they discovered (and the jury is still out on that) is some kind of magic radiation free D-D-fusion, it still doesn't work.The whole contraption operates at atmospheric pressure, so what you get is at best steam at 100 deg. C or 370K. Converting this to electricity in a perfect (but unobtainable) Carnot machine with a heat sink at 300K gives an efficiency of a measly 20%. So unless this thing puts out at least 5 times the energy being put into it, it won't even be capable of driving itself.

Even if what they discovered (and the jury is still out on that) is some kind of magic radiation free D-D-fusion, it still doesn't work.

The whole contraption operates at atmospheric pressure, so what you get is at best steam at 100 deg. C or 370K. Converting this to electricity in a perfect (but unobtainable) Carnot machine with a heat sink at 300K gives an efficiency of a measly 20%.

Well, assuming (which I doubt) that all they can do is heat water, there are a whole lot of industrial uses for heated water

than anybody had previously imagined. they couldn't do the math, they couldn't figure the calorimetry out, they couldn't recognize recombination oxygen/hydrogen explosions when one hit them.there should have been a patent for something titleable "A New Approach to Stringing Together Balderdash."

they were out of their field, they couldn't figure it out, and now fleischman's large body of published work, much of it rather suspect on examination, has got him another big business sucker with more money than th

There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's. The question is what?

One of the basic principles of science is parsimony: choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. I don't know what happened in the lab because I wasn't there, but if I'm offered a choice between assuming (A) some previously unknown phenomena, which nobody has been able to reliably reproduce, or (B)malfunctioning equipment or outright fraud,

There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's.

NONSENSE!

See my previous posting on the numerous experimental errors in their original experiment and paper. What they demonstrated is that they were very poor at experimental design, and did extremely sloppy calorimetry. I would suggest that anyone who tends to believe this stuff look into both the history of experiments in cold fusion in the late '80s, and then the fascinating story of the very similar polywater [wikipedia.org] controversy of the late '60s.

The cold fusion episode was a classic example of pathological science.

Furthermore, people have been studying the thermodynamics of deuterium adsorption into palladum since the 19th century! Nothing new here.

Actually, if I remembr correctly D. Fleischmann always said that his experiments where not carried out by the protocol. In one case they were, but the results were interpreted in a wrong way. I can only hope he's right. That would be awesome.Sorry, too tired to look for the actual source of my statement, but I am pretty confident that's what he said...

Where are the investors of D2Fusion when you need them for my own whacky ideas! Hey, check out my shareware commodity server, my blog, a few unfinished next generation C languages.... come on dudes, shower some of those greenbacks over my way and I'll throw in a stupid fusion fraud to boot!

They are talking about using a Sterling engine in their product. Actually, so that there is little vibration from the engine, they are combining 4 of them together, in series, so the vibrations cancel out. However, they claim to have a patent on a "Wobble Yoke" that connects the four pistons together onto a single rotating shaft. This sounds just like a crank shaft on a regular engine. How can that be patented?

However, they claim to have a patent on a "Wobble Yoke" that connects the four pistons together onto a single rotating shaft. This sounds just like a crank shaft on a regular engine. How can that be patented?

A wobble yoke (otherwise called a wobble plate) transfers the up and down motion of the pistons into a rotation ALONG THE SAME AXIS AS THE PISTON MOTION. In a car, the crankshaft rotates perpendicular to the piston motion. Wobble plates are not new (they've been used in torpedoes among other things),

This sounds just like a crank shaft on a regular engine. How can that be patented?

Oh, you must be new to Slashdot....

Recently I was in a restaurant. As I removed the paper ring holding my napkin & utensils together, I noticed a little inscription:

"Patent No. xxxxxx" [with a real number].

WTF!?!?!? Sure enough, someone patented napkin rings. I don't have the patent doc in front of me, but they made the description very general -- it covers much more than just napkins [but I think it mentioned food/uten

A company press release explains that, in brief, "cold" fusion involves the fusion of two nuclei of deuterium or heavy hydrogen into a single helium atom, accompanied only by a burst of heat. Unlike "thermonuclear hot fusion" that requires the plasma-inducing inferno temperatures of the sun or a hydrogen bomb, solid-state fusion reactions can be produced at normal temperatures in certain hydrogen-loving metals without unleashing hot fusion's dangerous radiation.

That's kindof the crux of the problem, actually. Assuming their measurements are right (that's a bit of an assumption, but there are quite a few people who claim that Pd-D cells generate excess heat, so maybe it's not THAT crazy) they're correct that it has to be nuclear - the energy density required is too high for it to be chemical.

But it doesn't have to be -fusion-. Palladium is past iron, so -in theory- you can gain energy by transmuting it downward, and some of them are claiming that they're seeing elements after the cell was run that weren't there before.

I'm not saying they're right, of course. It's still physics that would break with standard nuclear physics, but I'm always surprised that they keep pushing it as -fusion-, when they clearly don't understand (and admit that they don't understand!) what (if anything) is going on.

Note, incidentally, that if you read, for instance, the DOE report on anomalous heat from D-Pd cells, that both sides of the discussion are at fault here. A fair number of the criticisms ("your explanation doesn't agree with current theory, so it must be wrong!" even when the explanation is essentially "it must be nuclear, but we have no idea how") and arguments on both sides are pretty crappy.

The original Pons-Fleischman experiments suffered from several defects:1) The test tubes containing the D2O were open to the air. Diffusion thus removed very quickly the deuterium. Hence the claim that they had Deuterium in their "fusion" is wrong.

2) The calorimetry was done poorly. Again, the system wasn't closed. The electrical power input was measured as if it was DC, but my measurements of such cells show that the signal has significant frequency components in it - probably due to bubbling.

If you pull two deuterion nuclei togheter, you should get helium 4, and no neutrons. Or you get helium 3 and a neutron, but this is may be very unlikely (well, I didn't make the calculations, they are hard), so you'd produce almost no neutrons.

Not to say that I belive that he does what he says. But if he did what he says, he could very well get the results he says he get.

Actually, no. If you pull two deuterium nuclei together you get Helium-3 and a neut (50% of the time) or Tritium and a proton (50% of the time). So, half of your reactions produce a neutron. The reaction you present, deuterium+deuterium->helium is actually VERY unlikely (basically impossible under normal conditions due to parity concerns). Even if, due to some phenomenon unknown to current physics, he was exclusively doing this reaction there would be a flux of high energy gamma rays which would be easil

Are they getting more out of it than they put in? Does it matter? At the worst it will be as efficient as a normal electric heater. So my guess is that they are going to pitch a super efficient heater. Given that, even producing such a device won't resolve the controversy -- even if they sell them. If they can't prove to scientists they are doing this, I can't believe they will be lowering anybody's heating bill soon.

Actually, an electric heater is one of the most efficient devices known to Man. I mean, if you set up your device to waste energy and nothing comes out of it that qualifies as "work", then it's one hundred percent efficient.

I agree that this is probably yet another dose of false hope but I'd love it if it were true.

Personal access to cheap energy for everyone can have a very progressive effect on society. Cheap personal transportation means that a highly mobile work force can supply labor at a wide and changing array of locations near or far from their homes. I like this better than the utopia envisioned by some where we are all compelled by force to live in commune like dense housing with access only to 'public' transit.

If it worked, the neutron flux would kill you. Well, actually, if Pons and Fleischmann's original experiment had worked, the neutrons would have killed them. Of course they don't feel constrained by the standard model [wikipedia.org] of particle physics, so they get to make up any excuse for that that they like.

By that argument, you could say that Ray Davis's experiment didn't work, because it didn't agree with the Standard Model, so it obviously must have been wrong.

Ray Davis built the first neutrino detection experiment [bnl.gov] and found that there was only about a third of the neutrinos coming from the Sun that you would expect.

We now know that he was right - the Standard Model was (slightly) wrong, although in hindsight it should've been relatively obvious.

Saying "their experiment doesn't work because it doesn't agree with the Standard Model" is horrible science. The Standard Model is a theory. It doesn't describe reality. It's a -guess- for how the world works - a well founded, well supported guess, and the best one we have, but still a guess. If you find that the world works in a different way, that doesn't mean your experiment must be wrong.

There are plenty of other reasons to criticize cold fusion (the lack of repeatability being the main one) but "it doesn't agree with current theory" is about the worst criticism you can give.

Holy crap! Someone who can think! I hate to tell you, but around here, if it conflicts with the established norm, it's 100% BS. Things like critical thinking, logic, or the ability to infer is not allowed around here!

I highly suggest you take your toys and go home...where intelligence will be appreciated!

As the saying goes extra ordinary clams require extra ordinary proof. I'll have to believe this one when my feet are propped up next to it keeping my feet warm. Maybe it will be small enough that I can toss it under my desk like my old C64 power supply.

You have to admit, subjecting these claims to the marketplace should prove whether or not there's anything to them. The number of people willing to believe their houses are warm when they are cold is probably a lot smaller than the number of people willing to believe they've been cured by quack medicine.

But... the more things change...

In 1945, The World Publishing Company published a nice little volume, The Atomic Age Opens edited by one Gerald Wendt and helping explain to the public what recent events meant. Along with quotations by military people who had witnessed the Trinity test, tutorials on neutrons and protons "doing their stuff" (as George Orwell once phrased it), and so forth, were some predictions for the future:

"Dr. R. M. Langer, physics research associate at the California Institute of Technology, said five years ago in _Collier's_ magazine that U-235 could create a civilization in which man would dwell underground for better living....

[In the future] 'Light is generated by fluorescence which occurs around U-235 and is piped under the house through transparent plastic sheets along the interiors of rooms,' Langer said. 'The household supply of U-235 is stored and used slowly in the chamber where plants are grown. Appropriate portions are automatically delivered through a tube-distribution system to stations where they are needed to provide heat or power for machinery or cooking....'

Families will travel short distances in automobiles powered by small chunks of U-235 in a water tank inside the car, he said....

Admitting that none of the ideas he envisioned have yet been worked out in practice, Langer declared that the difficulties were those of detail...."

You could power your house off 235 fission (hey, we do with power plants), possibly even light your house via the glow discharge around a reactor but some people suggest that giving every house a big lump of uranium may not be the most sensible thing to do. So, what prevents us doing this is health, politics and efficiency concerns.

What prevents us using cold fusion is the fact that it doesn't work and has never worked!

Actually, last I heard, two groups were able to reproduce his results using the published protocols. Many groups tried either by NOT following the protocols or tried to make up their own protocol. These groups failed! But, we can safely ignore those groups because that's called BAD SCIENCE; which is what you're basing your statement. One group which did follow the protocol, did reproduce the results but came to a different conclussion of what the results implied. Another successful group was simply una

Actually, I'd count myself as a scientist (a nuclear physicist to be specific). Do you have a link to a paper by these groups? Many, if not all, of the 'cold fusion works' claims fall down upon close scrutiny. Measuring very small neutron fluxes is a very, very difficult thing to do accurately. Indeed the cold fusion lobby has now moved on to claiming that there is a new form of neutron free, D-D fusion taking place which explains the lack of neuts. The other indicator, small temperature rises, is also very

You have to admit, subjecting these claims to the marketplace should prove whether or not there's anything to them. The number of people willing to believe their houses are warm when they are cold is probably a lot smaller than the number of people willing to believe they've been cured by quack medicine.

Don't these cold fusion devices supposedly require electrical input to initiate fusion? If you run current through a resistor, it will generate heat, and how many people hook their space heaters up to calor

Either this is real and Exxon buys them out and stores the blueprints in a warehouse right next to the Arc of the Covenant and the 80mpg carburetor, or it's all bullshit.

Seriously, this would be the biggest thing since the invention of the AC dynamo, and as such would have a profound effect on the world's economy and socio-political power structure. And many folks out there hate change.

All you need to go with it is a floor or wall that the sun hits to absorb the heat and then radiate it back into the room later. Tile, brick, or rock on a concrete slab works great. A cousin of mine went a bit overboard with his first house in Taos, NM. It could be 10 degrees (F) outside and over 80 inside. Worked really well combined with the insulation he installed (R 40 in the walls and R 80 in the roof all of it celulose (ie shredded and treated newspaper)). Gas water heater, range and furnace combined

Are you producing excess helium with your basement fusion unit just so you can run your massively overclocked Intel Macintosh on your zero refresh time flat screen monitor at enough frames per second to keep you alive in Duke Nukem Forever?

What about all that helium produced when you're charging up your jet pack or opening the wormhole to your new office in Tokyo?

We're producing so much helium now that that the earth is lighter than its ever been! People are speaking in high pitched voices remote regions of New Jersey, and there are reports of rain falling up! Soon, we could see the earth become light enough that its mass is no longer in balance with its speed and our orbit of the sun increases, causing a new ice age! And its your fault! Stop the madness, burn fossil fuels.

Not that I have much faith in the Federal Trade Commission (after all, Sunday morning TV is still peppered with those infomercials for the handy-dandy Quattro (or whatever they're) called 'healing magnetic bracelets'), but someone is going to be mighty pissed when they find out that they've forked out 5 or 10 grand for what is effectively just a bunch of clever heat exchangers (i.e. Stirling engines) that they could have bought for a less than a thousand bucks. Probably pissed enough that they complain to t

On August 18, 2005, the Company acquired D2Fusion Inc. ("D2Fusion"), as a wholly owned subsidiary in exchange for a five (5) year convertible debenture in the amount of two million dollars ($2,000,000) and an agreement to advance up to two million two hundred thousand ($2,200,000) in the form of loans over the next twelve (12) months to capitalize D2Fusion' initial business plan. The stock purchase agreement further commits the Company to assist D2Fusion to have direct access to public markets within the next six (6) months for the purpose of raising additional funds in excess of those committed by the Company.
D2Fusion is a research and development company staffed by scientists and engineers working toward the delivery of proprietary solid-state fusion aimed at entry level heat and energy applications for homes and industry. Solid-state fusion is a technology more widely recognized under the name "cold-fusion." Unlike the reactions in "cold-fusion," D2Fusion technology uses much simpler and more reliable solid state processes more akin to high temperature super-conductor physics to produce and control radiation-free fusion reactions. In this simplest form of fusion two deterium atoms which are contained and constrained under solid state conditions fuse to form a single helium atom. Each new helium atom created is accompanied by an enormous energy release. Under ideal conditions, one gram of hydrogen fuel is equivalent to billions of watts of energy. Russ George and Dr. Tom Passell, who head the Palo Alto based company, have been involved with solid state fusion research since 1989. Successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute. The immediate intention of D2Fusion is to produce kilowatt scale thermal prototypes which will be further tested and refined by collaborating research groups in the Silicon Valley, Los Alamos, the US Navy, and Frascati, Italy. D2Fusion's ultimate goal is to produce heat and electricity at a fraction of today's cost with no emissions. The Company is well aware of the controversy surrounding "cold fusion" technology. However, the Company believes that there is sufficient global evidence that the risk/reward ratio merits investment. Should D2Fusion's prototype technology be scaled to commercial size it will help solve much of the world's energy, water, and pollution problems.

That "successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute" line looks very suspicious. For one thing, there is no "Stanford Research Institute" today. It's been "SRI International" since 1970.

Boilerplate from the press release, and what may well be the most significant statement:

A number of assertions in this press release may be considered to be forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including timely development, and market acceptance of products and technologies, competitive market conditions, and the ability to secure additional sou

"A number of assertions in this press release may be considered to be forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including timely development, and market acceptance of products and technologies, competitive market conditions, and the ability to secure additional sources of financing. The actual results Solar Energy Limited may achieve could differ materi

With the foot icon this would have been a good fun Saturday article to let folks have some fun. Posting it as a power dept article is just wrong. Guess we can feel fortunate it wasn't posted with the science icon.

Admittedly, I'm a high-energy physicist as opposed to a condensed matter physicist, but to me it looks like a bunch of BS. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's completely wrong, but there is at least one very large hole - I didn't read much more after I realized this one. Its section on Coulomb forces never truly explains how the Coulomb barrier is overcome. It uses a bunch of words to state, as far as I can tell, that because deuterons are bosons they can ignore the traditional Coulomb pressure. It

First off- a disclaimer: I'm a physicist but solid state is not really my area. However, that said, the explanation presented for how the coulomb barrier is overcome seems deeply flawed.

/PI'm on firmer ground with the later bits (I'm a nuke physicist) so I fell more confident saying that the section explaing why no gamma radiation is observed is just plain wrong. Of course, it could be correct and it's just our understanding of physics that's flawed- make your own decision!

The negativity is due to people who completely bought into the hype once before and were let down. Now they assume that all hype is false, and if they turn out to be wrong, pleasant surprise! Still, it's rude of them to patronize people for being hopeful.